Author: Allan McDougall and Robert Radvanovsky
ISBN No: 978-1-4200-637
Review date: 16/12/2025
No of pages: 280
Publisher: CRC Press
Year of publication: 11/09/2012
Brief:
A book about transportation security is all about how to keep things running, whatever the setback.
The book’s authors – one from Canada, one from the United States – give the book very much a north American flavour. Rather than go through the physical and other security you might want to install at a portor railway station, the authors talk in terms of mission analysis, mitigating risk, seeking continuity of operations, and (reflecting Allan McDougall’s Canadian army engineer background) ‘fragility analysis management’. A sea lane and container port or other transport system needs securing as an asset in its own right, and as part of (your?) supply chain. Take Hurricane Katrina, or a power black-out; if your goods or services or a supplier’s are affected, even if your organisation never goes to the port of New Orleans, you are at risk. Most intruiguing is an appendix, a ‘manager’s working tool’, ‘to assist managers in looking at their organisations in tersm of infrastructure assurnace and capacity management … becoming aware of the organisation’s strengths and weaknesses’. A dozen pages of questions and flow charts start with what your business is about, and lead to a ‘learning system’ so that you test plans and assess risks. Covered are everything from back up of data to lines of communication. It’s a process that you could apply not just to exports in lorries, but your mail, cargo, whatever the lifeblood of your organisation is, that moves around (the authors do speak in Darwinian terms).
